Futile Care at Life's End

The Science Times carries a brief article under the headline "Futile Care at Life's End," about a study that appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The Times reports that, "Of 1,316 patients, 123 received treatment that could [be] regarded as futile."

But if you click through to the actual study, it reports on "1136 patients." It looks like the Times inserted an error in retyping the number by transposing digits.

The only person quoted in the Times report is the senior author of the study, which makes the Times report seem more like a press release than like a news article. The news article would be better if it had included some comment from other researchers in the area who weren't involved in this particular study. The Times reporter could, for example, have called Dr. Ezra Gabbay, the lead author of a fine article on this topic that was published in 2010.